How Much Context Is Enough? Two Cases of Span-Conditioned...

How Much Context Is Enough?Two Cases of Span-ConditionedStem AllomorphyJason Merchant

Greek voice and aspect jointly condition verbal stem allomorphy, in-cluding suppletion. Negation and tense in English do likewise. Thesecases show that stem allomorphy cannot be restricted to cases wherethe conditioning element is structurally adjacent to the element thatdisplays allomorphic variation. But neither is contextual allomorphyentirely free from locality constraints: allomorphy can be conditionedonly by a span, a contiguous set of heads in an extended projection.

Keywords: allomorphy, Greek, English, span

The conditions on allomorphic variation, including suppletion, play a central role in debates aboutthe nature of the interaction between phonology and morphology and between theories that arelocalist versus those that are globalist. One of the central arguments for one version of a localistarchitecture comes from a putative generalization that selection of allomorphs is strictly local, aclaim I will call the Node Adjacency Hypothesis: in particular, that the appearance of a particularoutward-sensitive allomorph � can be conditioned only by morphosyntactic features of an elementthat is linearly adjacent to �. In this article, I present two cases of outward-sensitive allomorphselection that require access to morphosyntactic features of nodes that are not adjacent to theallomorph, from Greek and from English, and show that an alternative generalization using thenotion of spanning, the Span Adjacency Hypothesis, can capture these cases without permittinga range of unattested allomorphic variation.

1 Voice and Aspect-Triggered Stem Allomorphy in Greek

It is a commonplace assumption that viewpoint (or ‘‘grammatical’’ or ‘‘outer’’) aspect (such asimperfective, perfective, progressive, habitual) is encoded by a head that takes a verbal projectionas its complement, with the goal of giving a compositional semantics to such aspects (see Giannaki-dou 2009 for one set of proposals for Greek and references).

Thanks especially to Anastasia Giannakidou for extensive discussion of the Greek. I am also indebted to KarlosArregi, Jonathan Bobaljik, Vera Gribanova, Greg Kobele, Jack Hoeksema, Andrew Nevins, and Peter Svenonius forvaluable feedback. Thanks also to the reviewers for Linguistic Inquiry, whose comments and questions led to substantialimprovements in argument and presentation.

Linguistic Inquiry, Volume 46, Number 2, Spring 2015273–303� 2015 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technologydoi: 10.1162/ling_a_00182

273

274 J A S O N M E R C H A N T

(1) �vP� � �ev.P(e)

(2) a. �PERFECTIVE� � �Pvt.�ii.�ev[P(e) & � (e) ⊆ i]b. �IMPERFECTIVE� � �Pvt.�ii.�ev[P(e) & �t(t ⊆ i)[t ⊆ � (e)]],

where � � � (for the progressive reading) or GEN (for the habitual)

Such a semantics is designed to work with a syntax like the one schematized in (3).1

(3)

T(ense)

Aspect

Voice

v VP

. . . V . . .

It is also well-known that many languages mark such aspectual distinctions morphologicallyon the verb, through prefixes (as in Slavic) or suffixes (as in Romance, Greek, and Slavic), througha stem alternation, or through a combination of these. This last pattern is found in Spanish, forexample, where the verb querer ‘to want’ has quis- as its perfective stem2 and quer- as itsimperfective one; these stems combine with inflectional affixes that index person and number ofthe subject but also differ by tense, mood, and aspect (-e for 1sg perfective past indicative, and-ıa for 1sg imperfective past indicative).

(4) a. Yo quise ir al circo.I wanted.PERF.1SG go to.the circus‘I wanted to go to the circus.’

b. Yo querıa ir al circo.I wanted.IMPERF.1SG go to.the circus‘I �wanted/used to want� to go to the circus.’

Assuming a syntactic structure like the one in (3), accounting for the stem-selecting propertyof aspect is straightforward in a theory such as Distributed Morphology, as articulated for examplein Embick 2010. In Spanish, either V-v-Voice forms a unit targeted by Vocabulary (or Lexical)Insertion (because these nodes are subject to the putative operation of Fusion, discussed in section2 and indicated here with subscripts), or Voice, because it lacks exponence in Spanish, has been

1 This tree includes a standard ordering of the functional projections in the clause, including T � Aspect � Voice(from Rivero 1990, the first work to my knowledge to have proposed a separate VoiceP) and a separation of Voice fromv (following Collins 2005, Harley 2013, Merchant 2013, Alexiadou, Anagnostopoulou, and Schafer 2014, and manyothers).

2 It is a simplification to call quis- a perfective stem: it is the stem that the indicative perfective past is formed from,but it is also used in the subjunctive imperfective past and the subjunctive future. See Oltra-Massuet and Arregi 2005for more about Spanish verb composition.

H O W M U C H C O N T E X T I S E N O U G H ? 275

‘‘pruned’’ (using the operation defined in Embick 2010:59). Accordingly, I simply posit thefollowing context-sensitive allomorphs:

(5) a. WANTV�v(�Voice) N kis- / Aspect[�perf]b. WANTV�v(�Voice) N k[r-

This analysis, conditioning the allomorphy as it does by the features of the adjacent node,conforms to the constraints to this effect that have long been proposed in the literature; versionsof this constraint are proposed in Allen 1978, Siegel 1978, Embick 2010, and Bobaljik 2012.3

Bobaljik, for example, moots two versions of locality. The first, given in (6), bans allomorphselection in a head � by a head if is separated from � by the boundary of a maximal projection.The second version bans root allomorphy from being triggered by Y across X even when theseheads form part of a single complex head, as in (7).

(6) a. � . . . ]X0 . . . b. *� . . . ]XP . . .

(7) Y

X Y

X√

√ROOT

Bobaljik (2012:13) suggests that the adjacency constraint holds only of root allomorphy, ashere, not of affixal allomorphy, but in any case the Spanish examples satisfy the constraint.

Embick (2010) (see also Embick 2012 for application to Spanish agreement-triggered ablaut)presents a strong theory of contextual allomorphy based on how Vocabulary Insertion operates;he posits two conditions that will be of interest here. Condition A1 is essentially from Bobaljik2000, and condition A2 makes use of Embick’s notion of concatenation. (Concatenation is a termused in other ways in the literature, being sometimes defined over nonterminal nodes as well;for this reason, I will refer exclusively to linear adjacency instead.)4

3 The literature on allomorphy is of course vast; see also Kiparsky 1996, Carstairs-McCarthy 2003, Ackema andNeeleman 2004, Bye and Svenonius 2010, Arregi and Nevins 2012, 2013, and Bermudez-Otero 2013 for additionaldiscussion and references. Note that I am concerned here only with morphosyntactically conditioned stem allomorphy,not with phonologically conditioned allomorphy of the kind discussed in Mester 1994 and elsewhere, nor with possiblynonlocal phonological effects such as harmony (see Walker 2014 for a defense of a globalist architecture for these).

4 The conditions in (8) and (9) are taken verbatim from Embick 2012:25, but the ideas are found in Embick 2010.For example, A1 is stated as follows in Embick 2010: ‘‘Vocabulary insertion applies first to the most deeply embeddednode in a structure and then targets outer nodes successively’’ (p. 42). A2 is ‘‘[A] morpheme can show contextualallomorphy determined by another morpheme only when these two pieces are linearly adjacent to one another’’ (p. 15)(alternatively, ‘‘Contextual allomorphy is possible only with elements that are concatenated,’’ p. 16).


(8) A1Insertion proceeds from the inside-out.

(9) A2Contextual allomorphy requires concatenation (linear adjacency).

Embick (2012) illustrates the predictions of this theory schematically with reference to thecomplex head in (10a).

(10) a. Complex head

b. Linearization

Z

Y Z

YX

X√ROOT

√ROOT – X – Y – Z

He writes:

By (A1), V[ocabulary] I[nsertion] occurs first at X, then at Y, then at Z. Thus, . . . V[ocabulary]I[nsertion] at Y could in principle see either phonological or morphosyntactic features of X but canlook ‘‘outwards’’ only to morphosyntactic features of Z; and so on. In short, a node may show inwardsensitivity to either morphosyntactic or phonological features, but it may show outward sensitivityonly to morphosyntactic features. . . . [B]y (A2) insertion at e.g. X could only be affected by √ROOT

or Y. The reason for this is that only the Root and Y are concatenated with X. (2012:26)

Embick shows that it is possible to analyze the well-known alternations involving diphthong-ization in certain Spanish stems (pens-, piens- vs. tens-, tens-) as a result of morphologicallytriggered but stress-conditioned phonological rules, and not as stem allomorphy at all (but seeBermudez-Otero 2013 for a spirited rebuttal). Such an approach is unlikely to extend to theaspect-sensitive alternations (which are quite heterogeneous phonologically and lack any kind ofphonological conditioning), but the analysis posited above does not seem to run afoul of thelocality principles in any case, as the Aspect head is plausibly adjacent to the (complex) headthat shows the allomorphy.

Such a simple analysis cannot, however, be extended to Greek.5 Although Greek verbs havediffering stems that are sensitive to aspect, Greek also has a synthetic active/nonactive voicedistinction with an overt exponent. The selection of the stem depends on the combination of voiceand aspect, precisely the situation ruled out by Embick’s system.

5 I deal here only with standard modern Greek. See Letoublon 1985 for Homeric and Attic Greek.


The morphology of the modern Greek verb is well-studied, and the verbal alternations arethoroughly identified in standard grammars, such as the comprehensive Holton, Mackridge, andPhilippaki-Warburton 1997 (see also Galani 2005 and Spyropoulos and Revithiadou 2009 fortheoretical treatments and references). The verbs fall into three classes for the purposes of ourdiscussion: suppletive stem verbs, regular verbs, and irregular (but nonsuppletive) verbs.

Greek has three transitive verbs that show aspect/voice-conditioned suppletion: troo ‘eat’,vlepo ‘see’, and le(W)o ‘say’. These verbs, like irregular verbs, have three stems: for troo, forexample, the stem fa(W)- is the active perfective stem, faWo- is the nonactive perfective stem, andtro(W)- is used otherwise and is known as the imperfective stem.

(11) Greek suppletive stem verbs

Imperfective Active perfective Nonactive perfectivestem stem stem�affix Meaning

tro(W)- fa(W)- faWo-‡- ‘eat’vlep- L- iLo-‡- ‘see’le(W)- p- lex-‡-/ipo-‡- ‘say’

These stems combine with a regular set of endings to yield the full paradigm, illustrated herewith troo.6

(12) Greek suppletive stem verb troo ‘I eat’

ACTIVE.IMPERFECTIVE.NONPAST ACTIVE.PERFECTIVE.NONPAST

1sg tro-o 1pl tro-me 1sg fa-o 1pl fa-me2 tro-s 2 tro-te 2 fa-s 2 fa-te3 tro-i 3 tro-n 3 fa-i 3 fa-n

NONACTIVE.IMPERFECTIVE.NONPAST NONACTIVE.PERFECTIVE.NONPAST

1sg troW-ome 1pl troW-omaste 1sg faWo-‡-o 1pl faWo-‡-ume2 troW-ese 2 troW-este 2 faWo-‡-ıs 2 faWo-‡-ıte3 troW-ete 3 troW-onde 3 faWo-‡-ı 3 faWo-‡-un

ACTIVE.IMPERFECTIVE.PAST ACTIVE.PERFECTIVE.PAST

1sg e-troW-a 1pl troW-ame 1sg e-faW-a 1pl faW-ame2 e-troW-es 2 troW-ate 2 e-faW-es 2 faW-ate3 e-troW-e 3 e-troW-an 3 e-faW-e 3 e-faW-an

NONACTIVE.IMPERFECTIVE.PAST NONACTIVE.PERFECTIVE.PAST

1sg troW-omun 1pl troW-omastan 1sg faWo-‡-ik-a 1pl faWo-‡-ık-ame2 troW-osun 2 troW-osastan 2 faWo-‡-ik-es 2 faWo-‡-ık-ate3 troW-otan 3 troW-ondan 3 faWo-‡-ik-e 3 faWo-‡-ik-an

6 The stem-final W is dropped in certain combinations under conditions, at least partially register-based, that I willnot investigate here; I also neglect to indicate regular allophonic variation in the realization of W, which is palatalizedbefore the front vowels. Here and throughout, I also ignore variant endings and omit discussion of the distribution of thepast active augment, the stressed initial e-, which occurs when the stem�endings has no antepenult to bear stress, butwhich has an irregular form in a few verbs conditioned by aspect that deserve an investigation of their own (‡el-o ‘want’,imperfective past ı-‡el-a, perfective past ‡elis-a; kser-o ‘know’, ı-kser-a, ı-kser-a; pın-o ‘drink’, e-pin-a, ı-pi-a; vlep-o‘see’, e-vlep-a, ı-L-a; le-o ‘say’, e-leW-a, ı-p-a; and compare the vocalic augment verbs like ex-o ‘have’, ı-x-a, ı-x-a. SeeSpyropoulos and Revithiadou 2009 for an analysis of the augment in Distributed Morphology.


ACTIVE.IMPERFECTIVE.IMPERATIVE ACTIVE.PERFECTIVE.IMPERATIVE

2sg troW-e 2pl troW-ete 2sg fa-e 2pl fa-te

NONACTIVE.IMPERFECTIVE.IMPERATIVE NONACTIVE.PERFECTIVE.IMPERATIVE

(formed periphrastically) 2sg faWo-su7 2pl faWo-‡-ıte

Lexical insertion rules sensitive to these features can be provided as follows, assuming that theElsewhere Principle will apply to prohibit (13c) from applying if either of (13a–b) can:

(13) a. √EAT N fa(W) / Voice[�act] Aspect[�perf]b. √EAT N faWo / Voice[�act] Aspect[�perf]c. √EAT N tro(W)

Such context-sensitive rules clearly violate the locality conditions on contextual allomorphyas defined above: the environments for insertion make reference to an element that is not in thelocal—that is, immediately adjacent—context. It is impossible to correctly determine which stemshould be used without access to the aspectual information given by the Aspect head, but thishead is separated from the stem by the Voice head. This is not a problem in languages like Russianor Spanish, where the alternations are sensitive only to aspect, not to voice: the combined headV-v-Voice is adjacent to Aspect in those languages (or Voice is pruned), and so lexical insertionrules can be made appropriately sensitive to the value of the feature on Aspect (see Gribanovato appear for one approach to Russian secondary imperfective aspect consistent with the NodeAdjacency Hypothesis). But in Greek, the nonactive perfective morpheme -‡- is overt, and thustrying to write equivalent rules for Greek leads to (13), quod non erat demonstrandum.

The strength of this argument depends, of course, on the correctness of the morphologicalanalysis given by the segmentations in (12). A different segmentation might be proposed thatwould vitiate the argument against the Node Adjacency Hypothesis: if it in fact were the casethat -‡- were part of the stem (a complex stem perhaps the result of a further operation), thenthe selection of that complex stem could be conditioned on simple adjacency to the aspectualhead. In fact, what I have given in (11) in the third column as the nonactive perfective stem�affix,Holton, Mackridge, and Philippaki-Warburton (1997) give as a single combined stem: for example,faWo‡-, iLo‡-, lex‡-/ipo‡. But conflating the stem with the affix like this obscures the perfectlyregular nature of the affix. The only possible reason one might have for claiming it is part of thestem is that there is a small subset of verbs that lack -‡- in the nonactive, the athetic verbs, whoseproperties I discuss at greater length below. But such minority cases in no way obviate the factthat -‡- is otherwise a regular affix, any more than irregular past forms such as sang mean that-d is not the regular past tense affix in English. I therefore follow the vast majority of researchersin separating the -‡- from the stem.

The examples thus far are compatible with positing -‡- as a realization of the nonactivevoice head Voice[�act] under Aspect[�perf]. The latter head, when occurring with Voice[�act]

7 Treating -su as a portmanteau is not crucial here. It is traditional to segment this as s-u, with -u being the 2sgnonactive imperative suffix and -s- the perfective morpheme; this segmentation may well be right, but given that -s-appears in this form where the perfective does not otherwise show -s- (though see below for verbs that do), the usualsimple segmentation requires additional justification.


and T[�past], can then be analyzed, as Rivero (1990) does, as being realized in the nonactiveby -ik-, leaving the past personal endings (-a, -es, -e, -ame, -ate, -an) as the contextually determinedrealizations of T(Agr) (these endings are the elsewhere endings; they are blocked in the nonactiveimperfective by a set of more specific endings, as we will see below). Consistent with such anapproach are the entries in (15), operating on a complex head resulting from V-movement intoT as in (14).

(14) V(-v)-Voice-Aspect-T

(15) a. Voice[�act] N / Aspect[�perf]b. Aspect[�perf] N ik / Voice[�act] T[�past]c. T[�past, 1sg] N a T[�past, 1pl] N amed. T[�past, 2sg] N es T[�past, 2pl] N atee. T[�past, 3sg] N e T[�past, 3pl] N an

The difficulty that this set of assumptions presents for Embick’s constraints can be seen byattempting to follow them to the letter to generate a particular form. Take for example a putativestep-by-step derivation of the nonactive perfective past 1sg form faWo--ik-a ‘I was eaten’ from(12). In (16), the output of successive-cyclic head movement from V to T yields an appropriatecomplex head with the requisite morphosyntactic feature bundles. By (8) (A1: ‘‘Insertion proceedsfrom the inside-out’’), Vocabulary Insertion must start at √EAT , selecting from among the threestems tro(W)-, fa(W), faWo-. But choosing the correct stem—the nonactive perfective faWo-—wouldrequire that we access the features of both Voice and Aspect, and thus contravenes (9) (A2:‘‘Contextual allomorphy requires concatenation’’).

(16) Failed derivation: Output of V-to-T movement

T → ??

Aspect T�past, 1sg

Voice Aspect�perf

Voice�act

√ΕΑΤ

Perhaps the difficulty lies in assuming that Vocabulary Insertion accesses hierarchical repre-sentations like (16) at all. Another common assumption is that Vocabulary Insertion accesses arepresentation that has undergone Linearization (see Arregi and Nevins 2012 and Haugen andSiddiqi 2013a for detailed proposals). Linearization is the operation that maps the hierarchicalgeometry of an object like (16) to a simple ordered n-tuple of terminal nodes, as in (17). Withsuch a representation, each of the contextually specified morphemes needed—faWo, , ik, a—canbe inserted in satisfaction of its required environment and of A2. But it is unclear then whatcontent A1 has: how is the notion of ‘‘inside out,’’ which is defined on the geometry, to be


reconstructed on an n-tuple? It cannot be: the hierarchical information is by design lost in Linear-ization.8

(17) a. √EAT �Voice[�act]�Aspect[�perf]�T[�past, 1sg] N (Insert faWo-)b. faWo�Voice[�act]�Aspect[�perf]�T[�past, 1sg] N (Insert --)c. faWo��Aspect[�perf]�T[�past, 1sg] N (Insert -ik-)d. faWo��ik�T[�past, 1sg] N (Insert -a)e. faWo��ik�a ( faWoika)

One might try to rescue the Node Adjacency Hypothesis by making use of the fact that --is adjacent to the stem and that this morpheme by itself only appears in nonactive perfectives.One could update the insertion rule for roots as follows, replacing (13b) by (18):

(18) √EAT N faWo /

But this would clearly violate Embick’s implementation of (A1), which bans outward-lookingphonological sensitivity.

These cases of suppletion also put paid to any possibility of entertaining the idea that truesuppletion is limited to functional elements or categories, and is not found with lexical categories.This idea is stated by Embick (2010:84) as follows: ‘‘Marantz [1995] . . . [has] emphasized thatin a theory with some late insertion, restricting suppletion to the functional vocabulary is animportant desideratum.’’ (Compare also ‘‘Roots are not (by hypothesis) subject to VocabularyInsertion’’ (Embick 2010:53) and ‘‘. . . it is not possible for Roots to show suppletion’’ (Embickand Halle 2005:65, emphasis in original).) Embick goes on to discuss go/went and be, claimingthat such cases are ‘‘light verbs’’ and as such ‘‘members of the functional vocabulary’’ (p. 84).But no independent reason for classifying these as v and not as regular verbal roots is given, noris any citation to any work that makes such an argument. (One could cite here Van Riemsdijk(2002), who however does not argue that all instances of go are ‘‘light’’ in his sense.) It isfurthermore extremely unlikely that a compound verb like undergo/underwent, which shows thesame suppletion in English, could plausibly be classified as a ‘‘member of the functional vocabu-lary.’’9 See also Veselinova 2006, Corbett 2007, Siddiqi 2009, Bobaljik and Harley 2012, Haugenand Siddiqi 2013b, and Harley to appear for more discussion and numerous counterexamples.

8 While Arregi and Nevins (2012) argue persuasively that there are Vocabulary items whose insertion contexts mustbe conditioned by linear adjacency of nodes, relaxing the Node Adjacency Hypothesis to be stated over such linearizations,not hierarchical structures, would still require access to the content of nonadjacent nodes.

9 Interestingly, Greek lexical compounds formed from the suppletive verbs do not use the suppletive stems: anti-leW- ‘argue against’ (active perfective nonpast anti-lek-s-), Lia-leW- ‘choose’ (Lia-lek-s-), ek-leW- ‘elect’ (ek-lek-s-), epi-leW- ‘select, cull’ (epi-lek-s-), pro-leW- ‘predict’ (pro-lek-s-); apo-vlep- ‘intend, aim’ (apo-vlep-s-), epi-vlep- ‘supervise’(epi-vlep-s-), para-vlep- ‘(negligently) fail to see’ (para-vlep-s-), pro-vlep- ‘predict’ (pro-vlep-s-), pros-vlep- ‘expect/hope for’ (pros-vlep-s-). Transparent compounds, however, do: para�le-o ‘exaggerate’ (para�p-); kata�tro(W)- ‘eatup’ (kata�fa(W)-). It would be reasonable to attribute these differences to different heights of attachment of the prefixes:low attachment of a prefix in a lexical compound blocks suppletion, while high attachment in a transparent one allowsit.


The second set of verbs in Greek that are problematic for the Node Adjacency Hypothesisare the irregular ones. These verbs show stems that display a variety of irregularities, includingapophony, augmentation, truncation, and combinations of these: Holton, Mackridge, and Phil-ippaki-Warburton (1997:169–175) list 132 such verbs from the first conjugation alone. Someselected examples drawn from their list are these:

(19) Selected irregular 1st conjugation verbs in Greek, principal parts

Imperfective Active perfective Nonactive perfectivestem stem stem�affix Meaning

Lern- Lir- Lar-‡- ‘beat’eWir- iWir- eWer-‡- ‘erect’efevrisk- efevr- efevre-‡- ‘invent’fern- fer- fer-‡- ‘bring’fevW- fiW- fefx-‡- ‘leave’ksen- ksan- ksas-t-10 ‘comb (wool)’ma‡en- ma‡- ma‡ef-t- ‘learn’parex- parix- parsxe-‡- ‘provide’pern- pir- par-‡- ‘take’pin- pi- pio-‡- ‘drink’plen- plin- pli-‡- ‘wash’proslamvan- proslav- proslif-‡- ‘comprehend’prosval- prosval- prosvli-‡- ‘insult’sern- sir- sir-‡- ‘drag’steln- stil- stal-‡- ‘send’tin- tin- ta-‡- ‘tend’vaz- val- val-‡- ‘put’vWaz- vWal- vWal-‡- ‘take out’vrisk- vrik- vre-‡- ‘find’

These verbs raise the same issue that the suppletive verbs did above: the form of the stem isdetermined by the aspect of the verb, but by hypothesis, this aspectual node is not adjacent tothe stem in the nonactive. While in the active perfective and in the imperfective, one could claimthat Voice was pruned, making Aspect adjacent to the stem, such a move is not feasible in thenonactive perfective, given the overt exponent of Voice, -‡-.

One possibility that arises for analyzing these alternations that is not available for the sup-pletive cases would be to invoke morphophonological ‘‘readjustment rules.’’ For example, Embick(2010:99–100) posits a morphophonological readjustment rule to handle the unexpected appear-ance of the aorist morpheme -se- in place of -sa- in the Classical Greek optative active 2sg, 3sg,

10 As a result of a more general manner dissimilation rule, -‡- is realized as t after a continuant, though in certainarchaic forms, dissimilation does not occur.


and 3pl, which is triggered by a nonadjacent agreement affix. While it is obvious that there isno uniform morphophonological rule that would derive the alternations in (19), perhaps a slewof them could do the trick. But Embick fails to give any criterion for distinguishing between trueallomorphy, analyzed with Vocabulary Insertion of competing morphemic exponents as in (13),and the effects of such putative ‘‘readjustment rules.’’ As Bobaljik (2012:140) refreshingly putsit, ‘‘In theory, there is a sharp division of labor between rules of exponence and readjustmentrules. . . . Of course, there is a difficult grey area for the analyst in establishing just where theboundary lies; alternations like many – mo-re could be treated formally as suppletion . . . or asthe output of a very powerful readjustment rule, rewriting the syllable rime.’’ (Bobaljik himselfeschews readjustment rules entirely in his analyses of comparatives. See also Haugen and Siddiqi2013a for a critical discussion of the explanatory power of readjustment rules, and compare theunmincing condemnation in Bermudez-Otero 2013:83: ‘‘DM [Distributed Morphology] routinely. . . resort[s] to devices, like the unconstrained use of readjustment rules, that blur the line betweenallomorphy and phonology, and destroy the empirical content of the theory.’’) Without a criterionfor deciding when a morphophonological readjustment rule is involved, and when simple allo-morphy, the appeal to unspecified readjustment rules threatens to be no better than Justice Stew-art’s famous criterion for recognizing pornography (‘‘I know it when I see it’’) and becomessubject to Stainton’s (2006:107) criticism (of elliptical repair effects): it becomes a ‘‘get-out-of-counterexample-free card.’’11

We can thus conclude, with Joseph and Smirniotopoulos (1993) and Holton, Mackridge, andPhilippaki-Warburton (1997), that for these verbs at the least, three distinct stems must be posited.

For the regular verbs, Holton, Mackridge, and Philippaki-Warburton (1997) also claim thatthere are three stems involved, just as there are with the suppletive and irregular verbs. They list(pp. 156–158) 22 different patterns for the three stems for regular 1st conjugation verbs, and anadditional 7 for 2nd conjugation verbs, for a total of 29 classes. These are given in (20), withthe 1st conjugation verbs listed in rows 1–22, and the 2nd conjugation verbs in rows 23–29.With the exception of classes 14–19, the active perfective stem ends in the familiar -s-, inheritedfrom the Ancient Greek sigmatic aorist, which I will follow Ralli (1998, 2003, 2005; cf. Philippaki-Warburton 1973) and many others (and as is also traditional, and as Holton, Mackridge, andPhilippaki-Warburton themselves do on p. 18) in analyzing as a separate morpheme (the realizationof Aspect[�perf] in the context of Voice[�act]).

11 Note that I am not making the stronger claim that readjustment rules do not exist at all; as a reviewer points out,they may provide one insightful way to model analogical change that a total assimilation of irregular stems to suppletionmay not (depending on how we wish to model analogy, of course). The important point for present purposes is simplythat in terms of the theory presented in Embick 2010, potential appeal to readjustment rules makes the strong localityclaims embodied in the Node Adjacency Hypothesis unfalsifiable.


(20) Greek verb classes

Imperfective Active perfective Nonactive perfectiveClass stem stem�affix stem�affix Meaning

1. aku(W)- aku-s- akus-t- ‘hear’2. epenLi- epenLi-s- epenLi-‡- ‘invest’3. empne- empnef-s- empnefs-t- ‘inspire’4. vaf- vap-s- vaf-t- ‘paint’5. jatrev- jatrep-s- jatref-t- ‘cure’6. Lesmev- Lesmef-s- Lesmef-t- ‘bind’7. LiLask- LiLak-s- LiLax-t- ‘teach’8. pla‡- pla-s- plas-t- ‘knead’9. anaptis- anaptik-s- anaptix-t- ‘develop’

10. eksetaz- ekseta-s- eksetas-t- ‘examine’11. piraz- pirak-s- pirax-t- ‘annoy’12. din- di-s- di-‡- ‘dress’13. klin- kli-s- klis-t- ‘close’14. krin- krin- kri-‡- ‘judge’15. en‡arin- en‡arin- en‡arin-‡- ‘encourage’16. ksiren- ksiran- ksiran-‡- ‘dry’17. trelen- trelan- trela-‡- ‘make crazy’18. varen- varin- — ‘become heavy’19. pa‡en- pa‡- — ‘suffer’20. xorten- xorta-s- — ‘become satisfied’21. afksen- afksi-s- afksi-‡- ‘increase’22. sokar- sokari-s- sokaris-t- ‘shock’

23. apand- apandi-s- apandi-‡- ‘answer’24. krem- krema-s- kremas-t- ‘hang’25. kal- kale-s- kales-t- ‘call’26. epen- epene-s- epene-‡- ‘praise’27. kit- kitak-s- kitax-t- ‘look at’28. trav- travik-s- travix-t- ‘pull’29. ksexn- ksexa-s- ksexas-t- ‘forget’

While 10 of these classes also seem to require positing three stems (classes 1, 3, 8, 10, 13, 17,22, 24, 25, 29), another 18 need only two stems (since the alternations p�f and k�x are regular),or even one (class 15).

For a regular two-stem verb such as Leno ‘I tie’ then, there is an imperfective stem (Len-)and a perfective one (Le-).12 The full paradigm is given in (21).

12 Such stems are also used in the formation of other forms, including the gerund Len-ondas, the active perfectparticiple Le-s-i, the nonactive perfect participle Le-‡-ı, the resultative participle Le-menos, the result nominal Le-simo,and the present participle, which does not exist for this verb, but would be formed from the imperfective stem by addingthe endings -on, -ousa, -on.


(21) Greek 1st conjugation verb Leno ‘I tie’


1sg Len-o 1pl Len-ume 1sg Le-s-o 1pl Le-s-ume2 Len-is 2 Len-ete 2 Le-s-is 2 Le-s-ete3 Len-i 3 Len-un 3 Le-s-i 3 Le-s-un


1sg Len-ome 1pl Len-omaste 1sg Le-‡-o 1pl Le-‡-ume2 Len-ese 2 Len-este 2 Le-‡-ıs 2 Le-‡-ıte3 Len-ete 3 Len-onde 3 Le-‡-ı 3 Le-‡-un


1sg e-Len-a 1pl Len-ame 1sg e-Le-s-a 1pl Le-s-ame2 e-Len-es 2 Len-ate 2 e-Le-s-es 2 Le-s-ate3 e-Len-e 3 e-Len-an 3 e-Le-s-e 3 e-Le-s-an


1sg Len-omun 1pl Len-omastan 1sg Le-‡-ik-a 1pl Le-‡-ık-ame2 Len-osun 2 Len-osastan 2 Le-‡-ik-es 2 Le-‡-ık-ate3 Len-otan 3 Len-ondan 3 Le-‡-ik-e 3 Le-‡-ik-an


2sg Len-e 2pl Len-ete 2sg Le-s-e 2pl Le-s-te


(formed periphrastically) 2sg Le-su 2pl Le-‡-ıte

We can then posit a lexical entry for -s- as the realization of Aspect[�perf] in regular verbs inthe active voice, as in (22).13

(22) Aspect[�perf] N s / Voice[�act]

On the model of the lexical entries in (13), we have the following:

(23) a. √TIE N Le / Voice Aspect[�perf]b. √TIE N Len

If the conditioning environment in (23a) is correct,14 then these forms also show that the NodeAdjacency Hypothesis cannot be maintained: we have a V stem alternation that is conditioned inpart by the morphosyntactic features of Aspect, separated from V-v by Voice.15

13 Active perfective -s- could be argued to appear also after some irregular stems as well: apelavn-, apila-s-, apela-‡- ‘deport’; Lin-, Lo-s-, Lo-‡- ‘give’; priz-, prik-s-, pris-t- ‘swell’; soz-, so-s-, so-‡- ‘save’; ‡et-, ‡e-s-, te-‡- ‘place’ (thislast could be classified as a two-stem verb if Grassmann’s Law is assumed to be operative in the synchronic grammar).

14 An even simpler statement, as pointed out by a reviewer, would be (i).

(i) √TIE N Le / �s, �

But such a statement violates (8), which prohibits outward sensitivity to phonological features. Note that one could notreplace s, in this statement by their morphosyntactic feature bundle equivalents (Voice[�act], Aspect[�perf]), sinceit is only -- that conditions Le-, not Voice[�act] per se, which is also present in the nonactive imperfective.

15 One could try to propose that aspect in fact is closer to the stem than voice, as Hamp (1961) and Warburton(1970) do, but this proposal would face several problems. First, it would be incompatible with standard compositional


(24) Le- �- s- o√TIE Voice[�act] Aspect[�perf] T[�past, 1sg]

But this structure is isomorphic to the Spanish examples given in (5): if pruning is allowed, thenwe can prune the Voice node (or feature bundle), and the result reduces to the analysis of Spanish.

Notice that even Pruning does not help in the case of the nonactive perfective form Le--o.On the analysis mooted, this form would have the following structure:

(25) Le- - �- o√TIE Voice[�act] Aspect[�perf] T[�past, 1sg]

Since the crucial node that conditions the alternation is the Aspect node, it cannot be prunedbefore it conditions the insertion of the perfective stem Le-. The fact that it itself has a nullexponent, making it eligible for Pruning, is entirely irrelevant to the computation: it must bepresent in order to condition the selection of the stem, and it is separated from that stem by theovert exponent of Voice, --. This is precisely the configuration we saw above with respect tothe verbs in (19) that posed a problem for the Node Adjacency Hypothesis. Thus, even the regulartwo-stem verbs invalidate the strong locality claim of A1 and A2, taken together.

While pairs like (24) and (25) might suggest that Greek Voice and Aspect nodes are in factthe same node in some way (given standard reasoning from their complementary distribution),and that collapsing the two nodes would provide a way to save the Node Adjacency Hypothesis(assuming counterfactually that we could ignore the implications for the compositional semanticsthat provide some of the best reasons for positing the articulated syntactic structure to begin with),there are reasons to doubt that such a solution is feasible. Recall that there are forms in whichboth the Voice node and the Aspect node have overt exponents: the nonactive perfective pastsin --ik- illustrated in (17), for example, in which -- is the usual Voice[�act] and -ik- realizesAspect[�perf]. It is worth noting that both elements occur independently. We have already seenforms in which -- occurs without -ik-; there are also verbs in which -ik- occurs without --, theso-called athetic verbs.

semantic analyses. Second, it would seem to conflate viewpoint aspect with lexical aspect. Third, it would not amelioratethe difficulty for Embick’s proposals; all it would do would be to reverse the two heads that are jointly needed to conditionthe alternations.


(26) Greek athetic verbs (verbs that do not take -‡- in the nonactive)

Imperfective Active perfective Nonactive perfectivestem stem�affix stem Meaning

ke(W)- kap-s- ka- ‘burn’klev- klep-s- klap-16 ‘steal’kov- kop-s- kop- ‘cut’pniW- pnik-s- pniW- ‘strangle’stref- strep-s- straf- ‘turn’trep- trep-s- trap- ‘turn’tref- ‡rep-s- traf- ‘nourish’vrex- vrek-s- vrax- ‘wet’

These verbs take the expected perfective affix -ik- and the regular past endings, yielding forexample the following forms for keo ‘I burn’:

(27) Greek athetic verb keo ‘I burn’


1sg ke-o 1pl ke-me 1sg kap-s-o 1pl kap-s-ume2 ke-s 2 ke-te 2 kap-s-is 2 kap-s-ete3 ke-i 3 ke-ne 3 kap-s-i 3 kap-s-un


1sg keW-ome 1pl keW-omaste 1sg ka-o 1pl ka-ume2 keW-ese 2 keW-este 2 ka-ıs 2 ka-ıte3 keW-ete 3 keW-onde 3 ka-ı 3 ka-un


1sg e-keW-a 1pl keW-ame 1sg e-kap-s-a 1pl kap-s-ame2 e-keW-es 2 keW-ate 2 e-kap-s-es 2 kap-s-ate3 e-keW-e 3 e-keW-an 3 e-kap-s-e 3 e-kap-s-an


1sg keW-omun 1pl keW-omastan 1sg ka-ik-a 1pl ka-ık-ame2 keW-osun 2 keW-osastan 2 ka-ik-es 2 ka-ık-ate3 keW-otan 3 keW-ondan 3 ka-ik-e 3 ka-ik-an


2sg keW-e 2pl ke-te 2sg kap-s-e 2pl kap-s-te


(formed periphrastically) 2sg kap-su17 2pl ka-ıte

16 There is also a regular passive perfective stem klef-t-, but it has the nontransparent meaning ‘elope’. This is aninteresting reversal of the often-noted pattern of an irregular form maintaining or acquiring a narrower or unpredictablesemantics, while the regular form is compositional (e.g., brothers vs. brethren, older vs. elder, worked vs. wrought).

17 Most verbs that have a 2sg nonactive perfective imperative in fact form this imperative using the active perfectivestem (e.g., vap-su ‘paint yourself ’ (not *vaf-su), vrek-su ‘wet yourself ’ (not *vrax-su)), although the 2pl nonactiveperfective imperative uses the nonactive stem as expected (e.g., vaf-t-ıte ‘paint yourselves’, vrax-t-ıte ‘wet yourselves’).This -su appears even with verbs that do not take -s- in the perfective past, such as apomakrın-su ‘remove yourself ’ (cf.


For these stems, we could propose a null version of -- and introduce a diacritic on the stemthat conditions it, as Embick (2010) does for distinguishing those French prepositions that showportmanteau forms with the definite article (a � le � au, de � le � du). As Svenonius (2012)points out, however, the relevant rules are extremely powerful, and as such bear a severe burdenof proof over alternatives that might exist.

Similarly for the active perfective verb forms that lack -s-: recall that most of the irregularverbs, as well as the regular classes 14–19 and the suppletive verbs, do not cooccur with themorpheme -s-. On a traditional analysis, these verbs must be distinguished with a diacritic thatblocks the insertion of -s-, or else we posit a null variant of Aspect[�perf] for them.

Rivero (1990) gives a syntactic decompositional account of these alternations, with an inde-pendent one-to-one mapping of morpheme to syntactic head (see also Tsimpli 2006, Kallulli 2007,Alexiadou, Anagnostopoulou, and Schafer 2014), but Joseph and Smirniotopoulos (1993; see alsoRalli 1998) argue that such an approach fails to account for the complex interaction among aspect,tense, voice, and the stem we have just observed—in particular, the many patterns of allomorphy.They suggest instead that each verb realizes an unordered set of feature values, without a one-to-one mapping of syntactic or morphological nodes to morphemes.

But Embick and others are right in the suggestion that we do not want or expect a theory inwhich ‘‘anything goes,’’ as an unfettered morphological realizational theory of multiple exponencecould allow (but see Stump 2001 for an inferential realizational theory and how constraints onsuch a theory could be stated). Detailed examination of allomorphic patterns has shown that thereare locality constraints on allomorphy. One such is identified in Bobaljik’s (2012) magisterialinvestigation of the allomorphy possibilities found in comparatives and superlatives: only a contig-uous string of adjacent heads can be targeted for Vocabulary Insertion, and hence for allomorphy,including especially suppletion.

Bobaljik’s (2012) analysis provides the first explanation for the fact that while there areregular morphological comparatives and superlatives (tall, taller, tallest; stem pattern: A A A)and suppletive ones (bad, worse, worst; pattern: A B B), including suppletion in all three forms(Latin bonus, melior, optimus; pattern: A B C), there are no attested forms that follow the pattern*A B A (e.g., good, better, goodest) or *A A B (e.g., good, gooder, best). This follows if thesuperlative is built on the comparative ([[[Adj] CMPR] SUP]), and only an adjacent span can besubject to suppletion.

But as Svenonius (2012) is right to insist upon, contiguity is still a relatively weak notion,potentially allowing all sorts of interactions that appear not to be attested.18 He follows and

apomakrin-a [active.perfective.past.1sg]; apomakrino is a one-stem verb). This fascinating peculiarity and its implicationsfor locality of stem selection, overwriting, and so on, deserve a fuller investigation: it appears that a node as far awayas Mood is affecting stem selection.

18 Such potential but unattested interactions might include a wide variety of actual contiguities, such as the form ofan adjective being determined by an adjacent complementizer it selects (e.g., a hypothetical pair like Abby is angry1 butAbby is ungry2 that it’s raining, where angry1 and ungry2 would be allomorphs) or a complementizer having a particularform depending on whether the adjacent determiner of the subject of its clause is definite or indefinite (e.g., that1 theman left but thut2 a man left). It is important to remember that contiguity is a relation that is defined over strings ofelements, not just inside complex heads. See also Jenks 2012 for discussion.


expands on a hypothesis articulated in Williams 2003, Abels and Muriungi 2008 (where therelevant notion is labeled a ‘‘stretch’’), and Taraldsen 2010 (which gives further references forprecursors to the idea, going back to McCawley 1968), that locality for purposes of lexical insertionis defined not by intervening heads per se or only by phase or phrasal boundaries but by spans.Svenonius (2012) defines a span as a ‘‘complement sequence of heads . . . in a single extendedprojection’’ (p. 1) and hypothesizes that ‘‘morphological exponents are always associated withspans’’ (p. 3). I formalize the notion of span in (28) and restate Svenonius’s hypothesis as in(29).

(28) Let T be an ordered n-tuple of terminal nodes �t1, . . . , tn� such that for all t � T, t �

t1 or t is an element of the extended projection19 of t1.a. For all k � 1 . . . n, tk is a span. (Every node is a trivial span.)b. For any n � 0, if tk is a span, then �tk, . . . , tk�n� is a span.

(29) Spanning Insertion HypothesisA span and only a span can be targeted for Vocabulary Insertion.

For example, consider the heads in the extended projection of V in Greek: V v Voice Aspect T(setting aside Mood and Neg (or �), which are only analytic and occur above T in Greek). Eachof these, by (28a), is a span (a trivial, one-membered one). By (28b), the following are thenontrivial spans:

(30) Spans in the verbal extended projection in Greek�V, v� �v, Voice� �Voice, Aspect� �Aspect, T��V, v, Voice� �v, Voice, Aspect� �Voice, Aspect, T��V, v, Voice, Aspect� �v, Voice, Aspect, T��V, v, Voice, Aspect, T�

Not every possible n-tuple formed from the set of heads in the extended projection of V isa span; for example, �V, T�, �V, v, Aspect�, �Voice, T�, �V, Aspect�, �Aspect, Voice� are not spans(see Svenonius 2012 for discussion of general constraints on lexicalizations).

Svenonius puts the Spanning Insertion Hypothesis as follows:

[M]orphological exponents are always associated with spans, trivial or nontrivial. . . . A single morpho-logical exponent (morpheme, for short) cannot spell out two heads (cannot ‘‘span’’ two heads) unlessthose heads are in a complement relation with each other. Thus, a single morpheme cannot spell outa head in an extended projection together with all or part of a specifier, nor can a single morphemespell out a head in an extended projection together with all or part of an adjunct. (2012:3)

19 See Grimshaw 2005 for details: an extended projection consists of a totally ordered set of projections, each ofwhose heads selects one of the other projections, except for the lexical head, and up to and including a determined highestprojection. Familiar examples are PP, DP, NumberP, and NP in the nominal domain and TP, AspectP, VoiceP, vP, VPin the verbal domain. Abels and Muriungi (2008:719) are agnostic on whether spans should be any set of selecting heads,or only those within a single extended projection: ‘‘We suggest that a morpheme can realize a stretch of functional heads;by a stretch we mean one or more heads that select each other’s maximal projections.’’


One intuition behind spans is similar to the one behind Relativized Minimality (Rizzi 1990):one effect of the theory is that an allomorph can be triggered by a distant head only if theallomorphy affects all intervening heads as well.20 But while spans in some ways mimic possiblepaths of head movement, they do not require head movement, so the overt position of the verbin the extended projection is not relevant to the morphological spell-out that targets the span itis in: head movement may feed Vocabulary Insertion, but it need not. In Greek, where Alexiadouand Anagnostopoulou (1998) and Roussou and Tsimpli (2006) among many others (includingRivero (1990)) have argued that verbs move up to T, the resulting complex head is the input toLexical Match (L-Match), indicated with wavy lines, and Vocabulary Insertion, as illustrated in(31).

(31) a.

b.

faγo-�-ik-a ‘I was eaten’

T


Voice Aspect�perf

Voice�act

v

vV

faγo � ik a

√EAT

Note that the use of spans as insertion criteria does not alleviate the difficulty for the NodeAdjacency Hypothesis: the Vocabulary item faWo- in (31) is the nonactive perfective stem, andits appearance must be conditioned by the Voice[�act] and Aspect[�perf] nodes in combination.

Eschewing null nodes and Pruning, spanning allows us to posit structures like (32) for theactive perfective nonpast, where Le- could be posited to lexicalize the span V-v-Voice[�act].

20 This effect can be achieved using the idea in Kobele 2012 for handling suppletion and morphological spell-outas well; in Kobele’s proposal, contiguity of structure mirrors order of application of derivational operations, leading tosimilar predictions about constraints on allomorphy. Similarly, a strict version of Categorial Grammar applied to morphol-ogy, such as that in Hoeksema 1985, might make similar predictions.


(32) a.

b.

ðé-s-o ‘I (will) tie’

T


Voice Aspect�perf

Voice�act

v

vV

ðe s o

√TIE

While this representation does away with positing a null realization for Voice[�act], it doesso at the expense of the simple two-stem solution for such verbs, since we would then also needto posit a separate Vocabulary item Le- that would realize only √TIE�V, in order to allow for itsappearance in the nonactive perfective past: Le--ik-a. Since my goal here is not to present atheory of Vocabulary Insertion, but to illuminate the constraints on the conditioning environmentsof such insertions, I will not attempt to adjudicate between the two possibilities that arise: eitherwe posit (as before) a null affix to realize Voice[�act] (yielding the familiar Le-�-s-o, as above)or we posit that -s- itself realizes a span of Voice[�act]-Aspect[�perf], as in (33). Either optionis compatible with my contention that the Greek facts show that the Node Adjacency Hypothesisis inadequate.


(33) a.

b.

ðé-s-o ‘I (will) tie’

T


Voice Aspect�perf

Voice�act

v

vV

ðe s o

√TIE

The athetic stems in (26) might be better candidates for a representation along the lines of(32). This is illustrated in (34) for the nonactive perfective stem ka- ‘burn’.

(34) a.

b.

ká-ik-a ‘I was burned’

T


Voice Aspect�perf

Voice�act

v

vV

ka ik a

√BURN

The result in these cases thus is something close to that mooted for Spanish in (5), either byFusion (see the next section for discussion) or by Pruning of nodes that have no phonologicalmaterial associated with them (devices the spanning analysis is designed to eschew). Recall that


the crucial case from regular two-stem verbs like Leno ‘I tie’ came from nonactive perfectivenonpast forms such as Le--o, which has the structure in (35).

(35) a.

b.

ðe-�-ó ‘I (will) be tied’

T


Voice Aspect�perf

Voice�act

v

vV

ðe � � o

√TIE

Note that one could assume, as mooted above for -s- in (33), that -- here lexicalizes the spanVoice[�act]-Aspect[�perf], but doing so would run afoul of the same consideration that led usaway from thinking Le- could ever lexicalize Voice: we would have to posit two Vocabularyitems with as their phonology, one for Voice[�act]-Aspect[�perf] here, and one for simpleVoice[�act] when followed by the perfective past -ik- as in Le--ik-a.

The Spanning Insertion Hypothesis also allows us to account for the portmanteau inflectionalmorphemes used in Greek. While the Tense/Agreement portmanteau morphemes may seem tobe too mundane to be commented on (they also exist of course in English, French, Spanish,German, and many other languages), one particular set clearly demonstrates the advantages ofthe theory. The nonactive imperfective endings come in two varieties: one set is used in thenonpast (‘I am being eaten’, etc.), and the other is used in the past (‘I was being eaten’, etc.).

(36) Greek nonactive imperfective verbal desinencesNONACTIVE.IMPERFECTIVE.NONPAST

1sg -ome 1pl -omaste2 -ese 2 -este3 -ete 3 -onde

NONACTIVE.IMPERFECTIVE.PAST

1sg -omun 1pl -omastan2 -osun 2 -osastan3 -otan 3 -ondan


As Joseph and Smirniotopoulos (1993) point out, these endings are maximal portmanteaux: theyare specific to the imperfective, and indicate voice, tense, and the features of the subject. Theylexicalize the span Voice-Aspect-T(Agr); crucially, as (37) shows, these nodes taken together donot form a constituent.

(37) a.

b.

troγ-ómun ‘I was being eaten’

T


Voice Aspect�perf

Voice�act

v

vV

troγ omun

√EAT

Such examples are also important in showing that the spanning theory of lexical insertionis not just another way of encoding insertion at nonterminal nodes, as in Neeleman and Szendroi2007, Caha 2009, Radkevich 2010, and Haugen and Siddiqi 2013a. In such theories, which alsohave as one of their goals the elimination of operations such as Fusion and the positing of nullmorphemes, lexical insertion can target a nonterminal node if and only if the morpheme corre-sponds to all and only the features dominated by that node. In cases where the span includes thelowest node in a complex head (as in (31) and (34)), the empirical coverage will be the same asin spanning. But when the lowest node is not included, the difference in applicability of the twotheories becomes apparent: spanning can target a sequence of nodes as in (37), but there is nononterminal node that would qualify for insertion. This is because the highest node (dominatingT) also dominates the root, but the root is not part of the portmanteau (though see Radkevich2010 and Haugen and Siddiqi 2013a for attempts to address this point as well): the nodes spannedhere do not form a constituent.

We can thus revisit the assessment of Joseph and Smirniotopoulos (1993:393–394): ‘‘[S]uchan approach . . . is nothing more than a morphological solution masquerading as a syntactic one;in particular . . . what guarantees that the order of morphemes as they are realized is the same astheir order of . . . addition?’’ The answer to such criticisms is that constraints on syntactic verbmovement—or, as here, on spans—are exactly what guarantees morpheme order and, crucially,the kinds of portmanteauism that can be found. Accounts like the one given in Joseph and Smirnio-


topoulos 1993 (see also Embick 2012 for further examples of such approaches), on which ‘‘individ-ual stems are available to be ‘invoked’ by inflectional rules that refer to an unordered set ofparticular morphosyntactic features’’ (p. 396), are exactly the kinds of unconstrained accountswhose shortcomings authors from Embick and Bobaljik to Arregi, Nevins, and Svenonius are atpains to point out. It is, ultimately, an empirical question what morphosyntactic categories andfeature sets a given language makes use of, and what kinds of morphological realization thesewill have in the language, including allomorphic variation. What an analysis using an ‘‘unorderedset of . . . morphosyntactic features’’ cannot do is rule out any possible combination resultingin multiple exponence. For n binary-valued features, we would potentially expect 2n possibleportmanteau morphemes, with any features that are not expressed in a nonmaximal portmanteaubeing expressed with potentially regular exponents. Constraints such as contiguity—or, as here,spanning—cannot be stated (or rather, they can be stated only as ad hoc feature cooccurrencerestrictions; nothing about the geometry or structure of the features need inform such restrictions).At present, it does not seem that the considerable power of such a theory is warranted by thedata.

But while important, whether or not spanning is the best way to capture the distribution ofportmanteau morphemes or to regulate lexical insertion is not directly germane to the primaryquestion addressed here. The present focus is on the conditions on allomorph selection, not onthe mechanisms of allomorph insertion themselves: the Spanning Insertion Hypothesis is a hypoth-esis about which nodes can be targeted for lexical insertion or be realized by a single morpheme.But whether or not the Spanning Insertion Hypothesis in (29) is correct, it does not bear on theadequacy of the Node Adjacency Hypothesis, which is a hypothesis about which nodes maycondition an allomorph. In other words, we need a constraint to replace the failed Node AdjacencyHypothesis. The notion of spanning gives us the requisite theoretical tool to state a more accurate,empirically adequate hypothesis, as in (38).

(38) Span Adjacency HypothesisAllomorphy is conditioned only by an adjacent span.

This hypothesis permits nonadjacent heads and their features to participate in the conditioningof an allomorph, but requires that such nonadjacent heads (or their features) form a span withheads (or their features), up to and including the head that is adjacent to the conditioned form.21

This lets in a restricted amount of nonadjacency, yet meets the desideratum of not letting justany kind of nonadjacent head condition allomorphy. Allomorphy is indeed conditioned locally,but not, as the Node Adjacency Hypothesis had it, only by the features of adjacent nodes; rather,it is conditioned by features in adjacent spans, whether or not those spans are themselves lexi-calized by Vocabulary items.

21 See Bobaljik 2012:223n10 for a discussion of the Icelandic strong verbs, which suggest an ‘‘adjacency-by-transitiv-ity effect’’ similar to the one seen here in Greek.


It may be helpful to visualize the competing hypotheses schematically. Consider a complexhead or a span consisting of nodes N1 N2 N3 N4. The Spanning Insertion Hypothesis claims thatthe possible targets for lexical insertion are all and only the 10 groups given in (39); no otherpossible combinations (N1 N3, etc.) are licit targets for insertion.

(39) In a span N1 N2 N3 N4, the following are the only possible targets for lexical insertion:1. N1

2. N2

3. N3

4. N4

5. N1 N2

6. N2 N3

7. N3 N4

8. N1 N2 N3

9. N2 N3 N4

10. N1 N2 N3 N4

The Node Adjacency Hypothesis (without Pruning) predicts that only adjacent nodes can conditioninsertion. For example, if N1 and N2 were to be jointly realized by a morpheme, only N3, butnot N4, could influence the form of that morpheme. The Span Adjacency Hypothesis, on theother hand, would allow N3 and N4 to jointly condition the form realizing N1 and N2; it wouldalso allow just N3 to play such a role; it would ban N4 from conditioning the form of N1�N2 ifthe features of N3 were not involved.22 Schematically, where � realizes N1 and N2, we have thefollowing:

(40) Possible conditioning environments for � under the . . .

Node Adjacency Hypothesis

Span Adjacency Hypothesis�

N3 N4N1�N2

⇓

The Span Adjacency Hypothesis is thus compatible with the Vocabulary Insertion rules in(13), repeated here, which posit three stems.

(41) a. √EAT N fa(W)/ Voice[�act] Aspect[�perf]b. √EAT N faWo/ Voice[�act] Aspect[�perf]c. √EAT N tro(W)

22 Including this constraint is important: without it, the Span Adjacency Hypothesis could easily be vacuously satisfiedby the inclusion of multiple intervening nodes that play no role at all in conditioning the allomorphy. The constraint mustbe that no otiose nodes are included, that every node in the conditioning span is required, and that no conditioningenvironment can be stated that includes less information.


The conditioning environments in (41a–b) consist of the span Voice-Aspect. Recall that at thepoint at which the rules in (41) apply, the nodes Voice and Aspect have not yet undergone lexicalinsertion. There are no morphemes in those nodes, only morphosyntactic feature bundles. It isthe values of these features that jointly condition the stem allomorphy, not particular morphemesthat may or may not realize Voice and Aspect. The conditioning span need not be the same asa span that is targeted for lexical insertion. Indeed, in this case, we can see clearly that the twoare separate: Voice and Aspect are not jointly targeted for lexical insertion in the form faWo--ik-a, whose structure is given in (31).

2 Affixal Negation and Tense in English

The conclusion that nonlocally triggered stem allomorphy exists can also be reached by examiningthe affixal negation of English, n’t (see Zwicky and Pullum 1983). This can be seen for examplein the forms don’t [dont] and won’t [wont], which appear in place of the expected *[dunt] (� do/du/ � n’t /nt/) and *[wëlnt] (� will /wël/ � n’t /nt/).23 But the most spectacular stem allomor-phy triggered by negation comes in the behavior of negation with be. Many dialects of Englishhave positive and negative variants of be (Bresnan, Deo, and Sharma 2007). This is well-knownfor the present tense, where suppletive ain(’t) [en(t)] is the uniform negative form of am, is, are,has, have (e.g., I ain’t happy; They ain’t had breakfast yet), and in certain dialects, also of did(e.g., I ain’t know that). The pattern is summarized in (42).

(42) English dialectal positive and negative present tense forms of be and have

Positive Negative

am ain’tare ain’tis ain’thave ain’thas ain’t

There are also varieties that show this pattern in the past tense. These varieties, such as theone illustrated in (43),24 show two forms of the past tense of be, depending on whether affixalnegation is present or not.25

23 Also the irregular forms can’t [k+nt], shan’t [++nt], and mustn’t [mRsn� t], as Zwicky and Pullum (1983) point out.24 I do not know the geographic or social distribution of these forms, but I have heard them from speakers in rural

and urban areas of the American Midwest and parts of the Mid-Atlantic, at least.25 The negative past is sometimes written wont, as in Wolfram 2004b:332: ‘‘The generalized past tense variant wont

for wasn’t and weren’t in I wont there yesterday, found in some Southern vernacular varieties, is not typical of urbanAAVE [African-American Vernacular English].’’


(43) a. I/You/He/She/It/We/Y’all/They [wRz] angry about it.b. I/You/He/She/It/We/Y’all/They [wRdn� ] angry about it.

This is similar to the pattern found in parts of the British Isles (Nevins and Parrott 2010)and in southeastern coastal American English from Maryland and Virginia to North Carolina(Wolfram 2004a:292). Trudgill (2004:145) gives the following paradigm for the dialect of EastAnglia:26

(44) East Anglia positive and negative pasttense forms of be

Singular Plural

Positive I wus we wusyou wus you wushe/she/it wus they wus

Negative I weren’t we weren’tyou weren’t you weren’the/she/it weren’t they weren’t

The main difference between the variety represented in (43) and those of East Anglia andelsewhere is that the latter show a leveling that can be modeled with Impoverishment (to thesingular in the positive past, and to the plural in the negative past, and including more complexpatterns), as proposed by Nevins and Parrott (2010). But while (43) shows a similar leveling inthe positive past, the negative form is not obviously related to any plural form.27

One common syntactic analysis compatible with selection facts and with the ability of theseforms to undergo Subject-Auxiliary Inversion is to assume that the v/V complex raises throughNeg to T, yielding the structure in (45).

26 Trudgill reports that the pronunciations of the ‘‘plural’’ past in East Anglia can vary among /w\�nt/, /wa�nt/,/w:�nt/, and /w'nt/.

�27 One could suppose [wRdn] to be the result of a morphophonological rule of manner assimilation from a hypotheti-� �cal /wRz�n/ � [wRdn]; such a rule would have to be morphophonologically restricted to occurring in this combination

� � � � �(and in the forms [ëdn] (isn’t), [dRdn] (doesn’t)), as the otherwise similar dozen /dRzn/ surfaces as [dRzn], not as *[dRdn].This would make the assimilation applying with negative affixation a derived environment effect. While I know of noparticular evidence that favors or disfavors this route, it is clear that no such alternative analysis is possible for thesuppletive ain’t.


(45) TP

T

t vPNeg

v Neg

v

T�past, 3sg

t VP

t . . .

NegP

V√ΒΕ

The nodes in the complex head T in (45) can then be spelled out using Vocabulary Insertion rulesthat are sensitive to the presence of Neg (or, equivalently, the value of the Neg feature on apolarity head such as �).

(46) a. √BE N [wRz]/ v�T[�past]b. √BE N [wRdn� ]/ v�Neg�T[�past]

Such rules, however, violate locality as posited above. One analytical option to avoid thisconclusion is to use Fusion,28 an operation designed to map n nodes hosting n feature bundlesonto a single node, as in (47).

(47) T Fusion

Neg T�past

Neg�neg

T√ΒΕ, �neg, �past

V√ΒΕ

This option is proposed by Chung (2007) to handle a similar phenomenon in Korean (seealso Nevins and Parrott 2010 for application to English). In Korean, the verbs al- ‘to know’ andess- ‘to be’ have suppletive negative stems, molu- and eps-, respectively, and do not occur with

28 Another possibility, which I will set aside here, would be to claim that /n/ is the Neg, which triggers manner-of-articulation assimilation on the final /z/, yielding /d/, as in footnote 27. Such an approach would not extend to the weren’treplacement varieties; nor, assuming that T c-commands Neg, would it ameliorate the locality problem of interest here.


the usual preverbal short-form negator an(i)-.29 Chung proposes (p. 134) that the Fusion of Negand the V node precedes Vocabulary Insertion, as in (48).

(48) Fusion VocabularyInsertion

Neg

VEXIST

/eps/�neg, EXISTNeg�neg

Neg Neg

(49) [�neg, EXIST] N /eps/

Chung argues that such an account better captures the scopal facts of negation (since semanticallythe negation can take wide scope, like clausal negation, over other elements; cf. German kein,Dutch geen), and similar facts can be adduced for the properties of the negative past copula inEnglish. As Nevins and Parrott (2010), Radkevich (2010), and Haugen and Siddiqi (2013a) pointout, however, Fusion accounts require a conspiracy amounting to look-ahead: the syntactic opera-tion of Fusion must apply in the syntactic derivation just in case there is a Vocabulary item thatcan realize those features in the morphology (i.e., in order to block the otherwise regular expressionof the nodes).

A second current kind of analysis proposed to handle such cases (as well as portmanteauisms)takes insertion of lexical material to be able to target nonterminal nodes (Neeleman and Szendroi2007, Caha 2009, Siddiqi 2009, Radkevich 2010). These analyses do away with Fusion and donot suffer from look-ahead concerns. But as Haugen and Siddiqi (2013a) discuss, insertion atnonterminal nodes leads to what they call the ‘‘containment’’ problem: since a single Vocabularyitem overwrites the node whose features it matches, including phrasal projections, the theorypredicts that whenever this must occur, the root should allow for no internal arguments, a predictionthat is clearly false, both for simple affixation (solve-d the problem, proud-er of her analysis),irregular stem changes (understood the problem), and suppletion (underwent an operation, betterat tennis). (A reviewer notes correctly that this problem only arises on versions of nonterminalinsertion theories that allow insertion at phrasal nodes; if the nonterminals are restricted to possiblycomplex heads, the ‘‘containment’’ problem does not arise.) A second problem for these analysesis that they provide no way to handle portmanteau morphemes that do not include the root (suchas the Greek nonactive imperfective past endings above), a phenomenon that spanning, as we

29 Turkish shows this pattern for the existential predicate var ‘there is’, with suppletive negative yok ‘there is not’(cf. regular affixal negation -mA-), as in (i).

(i) a. Ev-de karpuz var-dç.house-in watermelon exist-PAST

‘There was watermelon in the house.’b. Ev-de karpuz yok-tu.

house-in watermelon not.exist-PAST

‘There was no watermelon in the house.’


have seen, can easily accommodate. (See Radkevich 2010 and Haugen and Siddiqi 2013a formodifications to nonterminal insertion theories that attempt to address these issues, however.)

Spanning, on the other hand, can give the analysis in (50).

(50) T

� T�past, 1sg

v ��neg

vV

[wRdn]

√BE

The facts from English affixal negation, therefore, implicate a more expansive notion of localitythan mere adjacency, a conclusion that is in line with a number of recent works (Bermudez-Otero2013, Haugen and Siddiqi 2013a, Svenonius 2013) that reach similar conclusions on quite differ-ent grounds.30

3 Conclusion

Nonlocally conditioned stem allomorphy exists. But it only occurs conditioned by a span (acontinuous sequence of heads in a single extended projection) and then only if the features of allthe terminal nodes between the stem and the furthest terminal that conditions the allomorphy areimplicated. The strong Node Adjacency Hypothesis is false, though the somewhat weaker SpanAdjacency Hypothesis is compatible with the facts reviewed here.

30 Jack Hoeksema points out to me that the distribution of the Dutch stem augment -er- with the stem kind ‘child’in plurals may constitute another case of an allomorph being triggered by a nonadjacent morpheme. Although -er inmodern Dutch has spread beyond its historical origin as a plural marker (being found in cases like kind-er-lijk ‘childlike’,kind-er-achtig ‘childish’, kind-er-kleding ‘children’s clothing’), with the noun kind itself, it occurs only in plurals. Inparticular, it does not occur before the diminutive suffix -(t)je unless that suffix itself is followed by the plural morpheme.

(i) a. kind kind-er-enchild child-er-PL

‘children’b. kind-je kind-er-tje-s

child-DIM child-er-DIM-PL

‘little child’ ‘little children’

Crucially, the singular form *kind-er-tje is rejected by many speakers (some appear to accept it; the argument againstthe Node Adjacency Hypothesis can only be made on the basis of those speakers who lack the form).


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